Rowena Garcia

Sentence processing in symmetrical voice languages: Insights from eye-tracking and priming experiments in Tagalog

Most of our knowledge on child language acquisition and psycholinguistics comes from studies on English and a few other Indo-European languages (Berghoff & Bylund, 2025; Kidd & Garcia, 2022). Consequently, current theories may fail to generalize beyond this limited set of languages. In this lecture, I will present our studies on the acquisition and processing of Tagalog, an Austronesian language with a symmetrical voice system. This verb-initial language has rich verbal morphology resulting in multiple basic transitive constructions, which exhibit variations in the mapping between syntactic and thematic roles. These unique features provide an important testing ground for accounts of thematic role assignment, online sentence parsing, and structural priming. I will share findings from visual world eye-tracking experiments conducted in the field, along with results from unsupervised web-based priming experiments.

Rowena is affiliated with Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, Germany and University of the Philippines Manila, Manila, Philippines, see her website.